Lucy and Henry Knox and the American Revolution: War, Marriage and Social Change

Phillip Hamilton
Christopher Newport University

Many fascinating subjects are explored in the Henry Knox Archive, one of which is the topic of social and family change during the Revolution. This issue is discussed in the remarkable wartime letters between Henry Knox and his wife, Lucy Flucker Knox. Henry married Lucy, a member of a wealthy and prominent Tory family, in Boston in 1774. When the Revolution began a year later, the couple fled the British-occupied city, whereupon Henry joined the Continental Army with Lucy supporting her husband and the Patriot cause. Over the course of the Revolutionary War, the Knoxes experienced many separations and wrote over 150 letters to one another. These documents are important windows into the past for they reveal a young couple placed at the center of momentous events, struggling to cope with conflict and revolution, while concurrently attempting to sustain their marriage and family. Written at in a direct, vivid, and accessible manner, the letters allow readers to see not only how the Knoxes surmounted the challenges of the Revolution (to achieve great fame and importance in the new republic), but also how the war fundamentally changed their relationship, marriage, and family.

Henry and Lucy first met in Knox’s “New London Book Store” in 1772. Although Henry came from a struggling maritime family, he had opened the bookshop the previous year. Ambitious, supremely confident in himself, and determined to rise in society, his store thrived under his careful management. Like all Bostonians, he knew of Lucy’s father, Thomas Flucker, for he was the colony’s Royal Secretary, the third highest-ranking crown official in Massachusetts and heir to the so-called “Waldo Patent,” a thirty-square-mile tract of valuable land north of Boston along the Maine coast. Upon meeting Lucy, Henry found himself dazzled not so much by her family’s name or wealth, but by her strong and vibrant personality; Lucy found herself equally enchanted by Henry’s warm disposition, genteel manners, and gregarious temperament. The pair soon began exchanging books and eventually love letters. In spite of some resistance from Lucy’s parents (who were none-too-happy at their daughter’s relationship with a tradesmen), the couple married in June 1774 and set up housekeeping in lodgings near Henry’s bookshop. Although Lucy and Henry passionately loved one another, they undoubtedly expected their marriage to be a traditional one, with a wife deferring to her husband and with the latter’s patriarchal authority rooted in common and statutory laws.